SEC distraction? Grinder Sherman, stubborn seniors won’t stand for it

COLLEGE STATION – Texas A&M coach Mike Sherman has had the best line to date about whether all of the SEC chatter is distracting his players careening into Sunday night’s opener against SMU at Kyle Field.

He’s right, no offense to future orthopedic surgeon Ryan Tannehill. In Sherman’s fourth season, the Aggies have started to mirror their no-nonsense coach: tough, gruff and as R.C. Slocum described Sherman, always grinding. Getting us back to Sherman’s quote – he means it. This eighth-ranked team, loaded with talented seniors, has worked too hard to get to this point, to let any conference alignment chatter – and the fact that the move is actually taking place a year from now – get in the way of its task at hand.

“We don’t have enough time on our hands to worry about things other than football or school,” senior safety and team captain Trent Hunter said. “We don’t talk about (the SEC). Right now we should be in our playbooks and not worried about it. We’ve got our hands full with SMU.”

Added junior receiver Uzoma Nwachukwu: “Honestly, I don’t listen (to any chatter) at all. (Fellow students) will tell me stuff and I don’t really even understand what they’re talking about. When you have a team focused on championships, you can’t listen to those things.”

Meanwhile the university administration, the catalyst behind the shift from the Big 12 to the SEC, has done its part to try to quell the SEC chatter leading up to Sunday’s game. Not long after A&M announced it was exiting the Big 12 on Wednesday, school spokesman Jason Cook said via Twitter, “the focus now is on (football) opening weekend.”

With a Mike Sherman-led program, there’s no doubt about that.

Postscript: The above video crashed four times on me in the process of trying to put it together. It became a mission to get it done, and I owed it to Lino, Brian, Jessica, Mike, Trey, Rebecca and Cole for putting up with me outside of Kyle Field in getting student reaction to the Aggies’ Big 12 exit. Oh, and Cole, you’re in college – it’s a time for freedom. (I intend for that to be my one attempt at “Dear Brent” for the fall …)